Jiasun Li, PhD

Dr. Li is an associate professor of finance at George Mason University. His current research interest is in the intersection of economics and computer science, with focus on blockchain technologies and FinTech applications. His research papers analyze how crypto tokens create economic values for digital platforms, the industrial organization of mining pools and implications for blockchain (de) centralization/energy consumption, incentive compatibility of Byzantine Fault Tolerance protocols, wash trading on crypto exchanges, the factor structures in cryptocurrency returns, and security contract designs for investment crowdfunding and smart contract applications to improve information aggregation. He has also studied the role of information in the theory of the firm and market microstructure. Dr. Li's research has been accepted in leading business/economics journals including the Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies, and Management Science, as well as leading computer science conferences including ACM Web (WWW) and Financial Cryptography (FC), among others. His ongoing research is also supported by the prestigious NSF CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation. He is a winner of the Yihong Xia Best Paper Award and the Chicago Quantitative Alliance academic paper competition, among many other prizes. He has presented his research at many institutions and conferences including MIT, Michigan, Northwestern, NYU, UC Berkeley Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, Yale, National Bureau of Economic Research, the Federal Reserve, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and U.S. Department of Homeland Security National Training Center.